For the past few days, I’ve been helping my daughters practice songs for our local talent show. I’ve been sitting on the couch with my guitar while they face me, strumming through the chords while they work to hit the notes and the words in the right places. They’ve spent so much of their time singing along in the backseat of our car on our way to town and back and occasionally they have joined me on stage at local events to sing “You Are My Sunshine,” or chime in with me on a chorus. But they’re getting older now and they want to pick their songs and stand behind the mic on their own and I couldn’t be happier to be their accompanist. And the experience of playing their music with them is bringing me back to memories of where I started—beside the guitar in the basement singing Lyle Lovett songs with Dad.

As I get older and the responsibilities of life weigh a bit heavier, I wonder more often what I’m doing way out here in the middle of nowhere writing songs, papers spread across the floor, stealing away moments to follow a line or an idea between making supper or carting kids to theater camp. The older my daughters get, the more I feel I’m missing when I’m gone on a singing job. And I wonder if it’s worth it.  

Because being a small-town musician doesn’t make you a rich woman. Being a small-town musician sends you out the door in the evening to towns hours away and finds you behind headlights in the quietest hours of the early morning, the hours still considered part of the night. The hours that, even in oil country, find you to be the only headlights on the road.

I’ve known this about my career since I recorded my first album at age 16. You want to sing on stages? Then there will be many nights where you won’t be home for supper.

You want to pay back those album costs? Then your weekends are planned girl.

You want a husband? Then he has to be the kind of man who doesn’t need you to make him those suppers every night. He has to be the kind of man who’s ok with you leaving the house at 7 pm to practice with a room full of men behind instruments. He has to be ok with you coming home at 2 am on a Tuesday night.

You want to make some money? Then you better find another job flexible enough to get you through from gig to gig. You better get creative girl.

Because, like most jobs, it isn’t glamorous. But for me, if it was about the glamour, I would have stopped after my first nerve-filled meltdown on the bathroom floor as a young teenager. I would have stopped before I made the decision on my college circuit to leave after a show at 9 PM from Fargo and drive through the night to get to Chicago to play on a stage before noon.

I would have called it quits after the first time I had to get dressed in my car and do my “shower” in a public restroom.

I would have quit before I got lost in Green Bay and Minneapolis, slept on the side of the road in a blizzard, or in the cheapest, sketchiest motels I could afford. I would have quit before we got a flat tire on the most lonesome stretch of highway on my way across Montana.

And then I would have missed the best parts, the parts that keep me doing this, the characters in my songs and the characters who come when I call with their guitars and harmonies and ideas, putting life in the music. Making me forget that it’s midnight and I have a deadline in the morning.

That’s the thing about live music, whether in a big metropolitan stadium or on a flatbed trailer on Main Street America, if you keep singing it will keep giving new experiences, new people to love, new places to travel and new things to say you’ll never do again. At least that’s been my experience all these years spent behind the guitars and microphones.

It transforms us. The audience. The singers. The players. It cuts us loose. It turns ranchers into rock stars. Strangers into friends. It makes stoic cowboys tap their toes, maybe dance a little.

It makes my little sister cry.

And it makes kids hopeful and inspired and brave. I know because I was once one of them and I guess when it comes down to it, I still am.

I strum a G chord and nod to my youngest daughter, her sweet voice projecting back at me, singing out loud the answer.

This is why I still sing. This right here might have always been the reason.